N.Korea stability rests on abuses and propaganda, say critics

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's leaders have assured stability in the communist country by instilling a sense of paranoid nationalism and carrying out massive human rights abuses, experts say.

Moreover, they say, the North Korean system could easily survive after leader Kim Jong-il, 67, leaves the scene because the hermit state has so successfully isolated itself that change is nearly impossible for most North Koreans to fathom.

"The people of North Korea live their lives subject to messages from the government of pride, paranoia and fear," said Kay Seok, a Seoul-based researcher for the international group Human Rights Watch.

More than 60 years of rule by state founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il has turned North Korea into an isolated, economic backwater in vibrant North Asia.

"What is remarkable about North Korea is that they have successfully brainwashed people into thinking that this is the only way by not giving them any alternatives or letting them know there are alternatives," Seok said.

HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

The first key element allowing Pyongyang's leaders control is repression, human rights groups and various governments have said.

They say North Korea maintains a network of political prisons where anyone thought to be associated with anything that may run counter to Kim Jong-il's rule can be jailed along with their families, who are guilty by association.

The North uses unlawful and arbitrary killing and stages public executions as ways to intimidate the masses, critics also say. It prevents free speech, controls all media and is thought to have ended nascent attempts at reform by executing or imprisoning those who oppose the state.

Experts say there is a vast network of government informants spying on co-workers and neighbors, and frequent purges of top leadership in order to prevent challenges to the Kim family leadership.

"In North Korea, no one has friends, just comrades," said a well-informed South Korean government source.

South Korean government officials said the North's recent saber rattling, which includes a May 25 nuclear test, are being done in part to help Kim, believed to have suffered a stroke last year, prepare for succession.

Kim's youngest son Jong-un is seen as being groomed to take over but experts said the young and inexperienced heir will only be able to claim legitimacy by upholding the system of Kim family rule that has spanned six decades.

NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA

The control exercised by the North Korean government began to fall sharply after a famine in the late 1990s that killed an estimated 1 million of its then 22 million people.

The North Korean masses learned they had to fend for themselves because the state was not going to provide for them, experts say. As a result, markets opened at the local level and directives from the central government were taken less seriously.

But the system survived. Citizens found their fate and fortunes were tied to a state that could relocate families to the most impoverished parts of the country, or cut the ruling elite off from treasured perks if they acted improperly.

"You cannot explain the longevity of the system just by repression. There is a reason for it and it can be seen in the sheer expanse of propaganda," said B.R. Myers, an expert on the North's state ideology at the South's Dongseo University.

Kim Jong-il instituted a new policy of putting the military first, saying his state needed to protect itself from a hostile world bent on invasion.

By putting the military first, Kim Jong-il distanced himself from the failed economy and positioned himself as the state's protector. He proclaimed that the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons had thwarted any attempt of a U.S. invasion and earned the state the world's respect and brought peace to the peninsula.

"The propaganda does have an effect and it can work just as well in periods of economic hardship," Myers said.

Experts have also said the North's leadership was extremely brittle, where any crack or opening that allows for greater openness having the potential to be destabilizing.

"There are North Koreans who can see through all of this but they cannot start a movement," says Seok of Human Rights Watch.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)